Pages

Thursday, October 20, 2011

Mobile phone, cancer "no link"

PARIS: The largest
study of its kind found no link between long-term use of mobile phones
and increased risk of brain tumours, the British Medical Journal (BMJ)
reported on Friday.

Danish researchers found no evidence of
enhanced risk among more than 350,000 mobile-phone subscribers whose
health was monitored over 18 years.

Earlier research on the
possible link between cell phone use and cancerous tumours has been
inconclusive, partly due to lack of long-term data.

In June, the
World Health Organisation's International Agency for Research on Cancer
(IARC) classified the radio-frequency electromagnetic fields emitted by
mobile phones as "possibly carcinogenic to humans."

The new study
follows up an earlier investigation that compared the cancer risk faced
by all mobile phone subscribers in Denmark -- some 420,000 people --
with the rest of the adult population.

Patrizia Frei, a
postdoctoral research fellow at the Danish Cancer Society, and
colleagues examined health records from 1990 to 2007 for 358,403 cell
phone subscribers.

Overall, 10,729 tumours of the central nervous system were diagnosed.

But
among people with the longest mobile phone use -- 13 years or more --
cancer rates were nearly the same as for non-subscribers.

"The
extended follow-up allowed us to investigate effects in people who had
used mobile phones for 10 years or more, and this long-term use was not
associated with higher risks of cancer," the study concluded.

The
findings, however, could not rule out the possibility of a "small to
moderate increase in risk" for very heavy users, or people who have used
cell phones for longer than 15 years.

"Further studies with
large study populations where the potential for misclassification of
exposure and selection bias is minimised are warranted," the researchers
said.

In a commentary, Anders Ahlbom and Maria Feychting from
Sweden's Karolinska Institute said the new evidence was reassuring but
called for continued monitoring of health registers.

There are
about five billion mobile phones registered in the world, a figure that
continues to rise sharply along with the average amount of time spent
using them.

The IARC does not issue formal recommendations, but
its experts pointed in June to a number of ways consumers can reduce
possible risk.

Texting and using hands-free sets for voice calls
lower exposure to potentially harmful radiation, compared to
device-to-ear voice calls, by at least 10-fold, they said.